


Four Deaths

by DinosaurTheology



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Death, F/M, Heavy Angst, Melancholy, Past Character Death, Sad, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-03 13:37:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15819960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: Four champions fought to defend Hyrule from Calamity. Four champions fell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The beginning of a little experiment involving the four champions who died to defend Hyrule and Zelda from Ganon. More to come next time.

MIPHA

Mipha crawled on her hands and knees, struggled to haul herself up by clinging to her trident, and then fell forward onto her face again. Well, she thought, walking is out of the question, I suppose. That’s okay, though. The Wind Fish did not make the Zora to walk, after all--we are made to swim.

Although, she reflected, it was not as though she would be swiming very much either. Unless, of course, she swam in blood. Mipha cast a glance at her arms and legs, the trail behind her, the pool beneath her, and grimaced.

Plenty of torn monsters lay to mark her passing, thier hewn bodies a testament to the grace and speed she showed with a trident. The bright blood of bokoblins and moblins and the bright, amber oil that lubricated the joints of guardians splashed crazily around the corridors of her divine beast, the beast whose allegiance she now struggled to regain. It was enough to make one a trifle arrogant.

Or would have, perhaps, had the monsters’ mess and guardians’ oil not been joined, in some places overwhelmed, by her own wine colored blood. The blood of the Zora, old Miziri had once told her when she was but a little thing, was dark because they were a passionate people and the depth with which they felt was stained upon the very essence of their beings.

Later on, after they had abandoned childish rivalry to become friends, Princess Zelda offered her own theory. Zora’s dived so deep, she said, and remained so long that their blood had to be dark so that it could hold more of the goodness in sweet air for longer. It was the color of blood, she postulated, that determined how long the breather could hold his or her breath. 

This was a good theory. It was probably even true. Zelda was right about most things, after all. It even had the added benefit of making sense. It explained why bokoblins, with their almost orange blood, could not swim at all and why lizalfos, with blood almost black, could put even the proudest Zora to shame.

It did not feel right, though, in the way that Miziri’s explanation did. Zora blood may not have been dark because of the depth of their passions but, well, it should have been. Mipha liked to think of how her love for Link, so strong that it leaped across the boundaries of race and even good sense, could dye her blood darker than ink.

She pitched forward again and cursed her light-headedness. “This is no time for a reverie,” she told herself, “nor thinking on what you and Link will do when this is all over, what you will name your children. Focus on the task at hand.” The task at hand and not his hands, his strong and sure hands, cupping her face.

Mipha made it another ten feet, another twenty, and then one at a time until she reached the monstrosity made of malice and poisoned ichor known as Waterblight. It regarded her with glittering curiosity. “Foolish girl,” it said in a rushing gurgle. “What brings you all this way?”

“My duty,” she gasped. “To the Zora and all Hyrule. I must face you.”

It regarded her condition, the trail of blood she had left behind her. “You could have died just as easily on the door step, my little idiot. No one would have thought less of you.”

Waterblight shrugged. Courage counted a virtue, after all, even courage so wildly misplaced as this. Farore herself had been counted a fool by many and all of her champions had from time immemorial been possessed of more guts than brains. So… so. If words could not dissuade the Zora princess then it would fall to the blight to prove her folly on her body.

They crossed blades in a clash of steel and magic. Waterblight stood astounded. All of his years of wizardry and evil, inherited from a father of the spirit if not mangled flesh, could not prepare him for this bright young girl’s shining decency, the fury with which she raised her tattered body to strive against him. They wove and danced in tightening circles more intimate than two lovers. Finally, when the Zora princess began to gasp for air and struggle to keep her feet, he struck his deathblow.

Mipha stood for a moment, transfixed by the demon’s glaive, then slid to her knees and crumpled to her side. From her open mouth a gout of that inky blood, so dark for one reason or another, rushed and then trickled. She thought, for an instant, of how glad she was that Link could not see her this way, that he would not rush to her to hold her wearing the armor she had made him. It would be a shame to see it ruined by so, so much blood. Seconds later, Mipha knew nothing but blackness and the loop of memory.

DARUK

This cannot be right, he thinks. Boulder Breaker cannot be this heavy, it has never been this heavy before. By the great goron ancestors Death Mountain, the entire Eldin range itself could never be this heavy! He struggles against the load, sweeps the huge weapon behind his back to start the process of swinging it at his foe and finds that he cannot complete the motion. He falls and the blade clatters to the glowing, rocky ground.

Pathetic! He thinks. What kind of goron warrior are you, Daruk? You’ve let down your rock brothers on the mountain, you’ve let down your steel brother Vah Rudania and--worst of all--you’ve let down your meat brother, Link. He saved your life from that moblins spear, you sorry pebble muncher, and you promised it to him in return. This is all you can show for it? Pathetic, Daruk, just pathetic.

Fireblight is slow. He’s ugly and he’s stupid. Even Daruk, never nimblest of the champions, can manuever and weave around him. He is strong, though, physically stronger than the great goron champion can hope to take in a head on confrontation, and this makes him in many ways the worst incarnation of the calmity that Daruk could fight.

It’s not that Daruk had expected Fireblight to be weak. That wouldn’t have made any sense at all. This is a champion of evil just as he is a champion of good and champions are the strongest of the strong. Daruk knows this because he was a champion many times over, had won more competitions at wrestling or throwing than he could easily count, keeps the medals and rock ribbons in a lockbox in his home. If he cannot overcome the champion of evil, then… does that mean that evil is stronger than good?

A miniscule gout of steam escapes from Daruk’s glowing brow. Gorons do not sweat, not in the way the meat races did, but hold a great deal of moisture locked within the crevices of their dense bodies. It is this water that helps them to move, to keep stony body and soul together. Given great enough heat, though, it boils before the sapphire within each goron can keep it cool and expands. If it expands too quickly, or if the heating cannot be stopped, the goron will literally explode. This has not happened in practice since the dreadful Volvagia had laid waste to Goron City and eaten many of its citizens a long age in the past. They were a stout people, hardy, and made for heat. Daruk never imagined he would feel it surging with him, all the rocky crystals of his being struggling and crying out against it.

That’s the problem with Fireblight, he realizes. The damned thing is hot, too hot. Even a goron cannot survive long against its blazing bursts of dragon flame. I can try, though, Daruk thinks, and pray to all the ancestors that it will end up being enough.

Fireblight speaks, finally, in a voice like the clashing of molten rock deep under Hyrule. His speech is slow, like his movement, and carries great weight like his blows. “Champion Daruk,” he says. “Why do you persist in a fight you know is futile?”

“Because I’m a goron,” he says. “We don’t know the meaning of the word quit!”

Fireblight chuckles. “There are many words to which you do not know the meaning, Daruk. That is why gorons always remain dupes of the zora, the rito, the gerudo… but especially the hylians! They think you fools. Strong, useful fools but fools nonetheless.”

“Not true,” he says. “My brother champions, and my brother Link, all respect me. They respect my strength and my loyalty. So what if I can’t talk as pretty as Princess Zelda? She can’t toss a heavy rock as far as me. Wer’re greater because we’re different, not lesser.”

“Then why do you suffer in the miserable depths of Death Mountain, goron champion, while they wait on the surface above?”

 

“Again because I am a goron,” Daruk says. “You must have rocks for brains.” He laughs at the old goron joke--everyone knows that your brains are diamond and luminous stone!--and goes on, “Who else could’ve chased Rudania into this pit after you stole him from us? It would be as foolish to ask Revali or little Mipha to fight you as it would to ask me to fly or swim up a waterfall!”

Sensing, even in his dim way, that this ploy is not working Fireblight changes tactics. “Yes, you chased Rudania into this volcano because you could not control him. You truly are the weakest of Hyrule’s champions, Daruk, for all your vaunted strength.”

He shrugs. “None of my brother champions could keep you and your fellow blights from claiming our Divine Beasts. Mine only leaped into the belly of the mountain. Why, stonebubbles. Naboris destroyed an outpost and was only just turned from Gerudo Town itself. None of us blame Urbosa, and none of us think her weak. We are strong, as I said before, and when we have reclaimed our beasts we will be stronger yet!”

“You will not be strong,” Fireblight says, “nor will your companions. You will be dead.” The conversation seems over. The champion and blight have said as much as either one can say. Neither is, after all, a creature fond of mincing words. They return to a speech that suits each of them better and re-start their battle in earnest. Daruk the mighty, champion of the gorons and protector of Death Mountain, fights valiantly. He struggles without flagging. He strikes blow after blow and does not give in.

None of it matters. He falls anyway and Fireblight heaves a heavy sigh. In the depths of the mountain it could be taken for laughter or the crackling a flame.


	2. Chapter 2

REVALI

High and fast as a whipping gale does Revali, first archer of the rito, fly. He soars up and above the trees, aross and beyond mountains, through knotholes in rock so tight that to thread them is like threading a needle. All in pursuit of Vah Medoh, his Divine Beast, and the agent of calamity who has her under his thrall.

He wonders, for a brief moment, why he thinks of Medoh as feminine, as she. It is no more delicate than any of the others and, if anything, it would make sense for Mipha, who squeals about how cute her Ruta is as much or more than she does about Link, to develop such an affectation. Perhaps he merely follows the convention of sailors--for the rito with their wanderlust are the finest sailors on life, have sailed even beyond Koholit Rock on Hyrule’s stormy, southern seas. And what is Medoh, he wonders, but a ship of the air?

At any rate she is his, alone, and no cursed damn thing like Windblight will steal her away from him. The only piece of ancient technology that has not been purloined from them, thus far, is Link’s little needle, that ever-irritating Sword to Seal the Darknes. Are they somehow less than he is to have been overcome in this way where he was not? It is… irksome to consider, to say the least.

And so Revali won’t. He concentrates, instead, on catching up to Medoh. She flies higher and faster than a blizzard over Hebra and it takes all of his skill, grit and command over the wind to even approach her. Finally he does and alights on the Divine Beast’s broad back to come face to face with that most bothersome of manifestations of calamity, Windblight.

“So,” he says to the beast. “So. Shall we make this easy or hard?”

“What?” The answer is like a gale shrieking through dead trees. “How shall we answer it? What will it hear?”

“‘We?’” Revali ruffled the feathers above his beak. “What lunacy do you babble, creature? I see only one of you.”

“One, perhaps, but all the winds are one,” Windblight says. “I sail them and they whisper to me. They tell me much and more, Revali of the rito, of Hyrule. Of the champions and Princess Zelda. Of you.”

Revali snorts. There is no time for such nonsense. “You speak much but say little,” he says. “Answer me plain, with sense. Will you surrender my Medoh to me or must I prove my mettle on your body?”

“So much to prove, Revali of the rito, so much to prove,” he says. “There is as much air in your as around you.” He laughs. It hisses, sounded like a death rattle in dry leaves or cicadas when they wake from their seventeen year nap in the deep, southern forests of Faron. “You crow like the rooster you resemble but I know that you are nothing but the sigh of locusts’ legs.”

There is nothing more to say, so why waste the wind? Revali is a champion of the winds, after all, so should he not hold it precious? He lunges at the Windblight. Quarters are too close for his bow here, at least until he climbs aloft on a gale, so he dances in and out with a rapier and dagger. 

Windblight fights in kind, deft and sure. They fence in double time, offer thrust, parry and riposte. Finally, after many long minutes, Revali finds a gale and hurled himself aloft. He spun on the air, seeks to unsling his bow and eagle feather arrows, but finds his opponent has followed him on wings as swift as his own.

They fight high in the crisp, cold air for what seemed like an eternity. Revali knows, though, that it would have been impossible to fly at such an altitude, with such exertion, for more than a few minutes. Time seems to dilate, stretching along strange seams, at moments like these. He ducks, bobs and weaves until he cannot scratch another ounce of effort from his feathers and muscles, cannot find any more support in the wind itself. Revali, first archer of the rito, is spent and he knows it.

It’s not a solid blow that fells him. Revali has to laugh at the sheer, brutal stupidity of it. A glancing slash to his shoulder, above the wing, sends him careening off course in a shower of bright blood. He careers wildly into a violent spin and, within seconds, crashes into Medoh. His last thoughts are that it is sure to leave a broad scar, a scar to feel pride in, and that this is a truly stupid way to die.

URBOSA

Urbosa, chief of the Gerudo and mistress of thunder and lightning, walks in the cool interior of her divine beast. Naboris is spacious and great fans turn the air within her. It may be a concession to the brutal heat of the Gerudo Wastes, a land that only the hardiest are able to survive, but she does not know. Perhaps it has something to do with the conduction of electricity in the great camel’s belly but, Urbosa knows, is beyond her wisdom and so she feels no point in worrying about it. 

She chuckles to herself. There will be littling point in worrying about anything at all unless she is able to wrest control of Naboris away from the creeping manifestation of calamity that has stolen the divine beast away from her. Naboris has begun a steady march towards Nabooru and destroyed outposts and oasis trading villages along the way. She thinks of the burned, twisted bodies of her sisters in the sand and any trace of levity drains away.

Urbosa grits her teeth and stalks forward. A guardian, one of the short, pathetic little pieces of walking pottery that sometimes litters an old treasure dig site, waddles forward to challenge her. It falls before the Scimitar of the Seven in fast fashion and so does another, and another beyond it. She has begun to work up a sweat, to feel the sweet loose heat in her muscles, and growls with sheer pleasure taken in hunting and fighting.

I will not fail you, my little bird, she thinks. I could not save your mother, your sweet, beautiful mother, beause her own body failed her. But I can save you from a cruel fate at the hands of calamity. I am Urbosa, mistress of thunder and champion of the Gerudo. There is neither warrior nor beast that I cannot defeat!

It takes a long time for her to follow the winding paths through Naboris. She finds that she must avoid traps, too, that the agent of calamity has set for her in the divine beast’s bowels. A lance of lightning flashes past her head here, or a shower of electrified arrows showers around her body there. It is nothing to difficult to figure out, though. Calamity may be powerful, Urbosa reflects, but it has thus far displayed little in the way of intelligence.

Finally, after much walking and climbing but little real effort, she arrives in the chamber from which she had piloted Naboris. Thunderblight awaits her there. It does not turn to greet her but speaks in a voice like the sizzling of flesh in a hot pan. “Salutations, chieftain. Have you come to pay your respects?”

“I have no respect for you,” she says. “Release Naboris from your control.”

“No respect,” it muses. “Do you know for whom your beast is named?”

“Nabooru,” she says. “The hero of my people who stood up to Ganondorf, for whom our capital is named.”

“A traitor,” Thunderblight says. “For whom a den of thieves is named, a wretched hive that this beast will soon wipe from the face of Hyrule.”

“There is only one traitor to the Gerudo that I can think of,” Urbosa says. “The echo of your master’s memory, Ganondorf the thief. He is a traitor the prosperity of the Gerudo, to our good name. He is the scourge that kept us wallowing in the desert for a millenia, like the geldarm, molduga and other beasts of the sand. He is the shame of the Gerudo.”

“There may be truth in that,” Thunderblight says “but there are many truths.”

“All voe and vai are entiled to their own beliefs,” Urbosa says, “but not to their own truths. There is but one truth and I have spoken it.”

“You are a fool with a limited vision of the truth, Urbosa of the Geurdo. I have looked into the mirror that sleeps under the sand, the glass on which the twilight shimmers. I have asked the twinned souls and consulted the moon. I know much and more of what you can only dream. The truth is what I say it is, Gerudo chief, and I say that the great King of Thieves from whence my master sprang is the pride of the Gerudo, not your shame. When we have reshaped the cosmos in his image you will bow before him and be glad.”

“I will never bow to Ganondorf,” she says. “To no voe will I bow. The thought burrows in my flesh like a blade.”

“If your neck is so stiff, Urbosa the Chieftain, then it will prove a tempting target for the blade. Such will be the fate of all who oppose my master the calamity. Even…” Thunderblight offers an awful, glistening smile. “Even your Little Bird will bend or die, my chieftain. But I think she will bend and kiss my master’s feet.”

The time for talk is done. Urbosa launches herself across the deck of her beast’s control room, spins the Scimitar of the Seven and Daybreaker. She is a storm in the desert and cannot be contended with easily. It does not matter. Thunderblight is not a foe to be taken lightly, nor to be taken in mindless fury, and she cannot see clearly enough to fight with her head and not her heart.

Their battle lasts only seconds. Urbosa inflicts great, sweeping draw cuts in the blight’s rough hide but her blade cannot seem to find purchase to land a fatal blow. His does in a glancing strike across her throat. It opens a second, crimson mouth to gape beneath Urbosa’s chin.

She falls to her knees and thinks, Little Bird, I have failed you, I have failed everyone, before she is unable to think anything else. Blackness consumes her and her storm aross the desert subsides.


End file.
